"Taking its title from an African word for fable, its discreet crane shots and Jerome Robbins choreography from the Hollywood musicals of the 1950s, its strident colors, slangy, innuendo-ridden dialogue and miscellaneous comic stereotypes from Cuba's 19th century Teatro Bufo, Patakin transposes two figures out of Yoruba mythology to contemporary Cuba. Shang-, the thunder god, is here an irresistible lumpen layabout-when he shows up, loudly singing his own praises, even octogenarians start to rhumba-while his nemesis Oga staid model worker who drives the tractor on a collective farm. With musical numbers more bossa nova than salsa, it establishes an amiable innocence, abetted by a Tashlinesque sense of humor and some beach scenes that would hardly seem out of place in How to Stuff a Wild Bikini.... "Patakin may be the first Cuban musical, but (for all its entertainment value) it's relentless in its political points.... Patakin is the most candid treatment of the island's macho mentality I've ever seen. (It's also one of the few Cuban films I know that addresses, however obliquely, that culture's color line-Shang- being black and Ogte.)... There's a production number by the collective farm's irrigation ditch...that parodies the Hollywood and Soviet models alike.... As a Communist musical it's of a completely different order than, say, The East Is Red." J. Hoberman, Village Voice